This is the blog of The Heroic Age, http://www.heroicage.org, an online journal dedicated to the study of European Northwest from 400-1100 AD. This space will be used to make announcements about news items, books, and other related medieval news of interest to The Heroic Age readers.

Monday, June 13, 2016

The shifting borderland between Byzantine and Armenian culture-complexes in Eastern Anatolia and the Armenian plateau was a site of contact and conflict, alliances made and discarded, cultural exchange and cultural imperialism. This two-day workshop will explore narratives of exchange and conflict between Byzantium and Armenia, broadly defined: narrative in its largest and most productive sense oftelling stories; and 'Byzantium' and 'Armenia' encompassing the encounter in the frontier zone, the presence of Armenians in Byzantine society, the exchange of ideas, relics, language, and persons over cultural and cultic boundaries, and the perils and problems of annexation, imperialism(s), and survival.

Papers given at this workshop should explore the narrative process behind these moments of contact and conflict. Possible angles of approach might include: the enshrinement of memory (in historiography, relics, art); self-fashioning of Byzantine and Armenian 'border-crossers'; the process of translation; narratives of enmity or of conversion; nationalist narratives (their problems and their benefits); self-fashioning of modern 'Armenologists' and 'Byzantinologists' with reference to what we might gain from one another – amongst other topics.